12 Ocak 2008 Cumartesi

VİDEO LOST BODY

Lost Body 2005

When Freud had been doing his interior dismantling towards psychoanalysis in his last period, he had said, “Playing tennis was more important than all the determinations that I had done about human being.” The first influence that blossomed in my mind at the time when I heard this statement for the first time was his emphasis upon “play” rather than upon the philosophical side of the expression. Freud’s determination was presumably a restoration of the credit of play that he had done within his discipline.

Every kind of power, especially the one which is military, within an endless and unfathomable spiral, with its body hounds in an orb and expandes itself, goes hunting like a tyran carnivorous that makes we victims’ ears ring by its breathing, as it touches the orb, it scratches the rejoicing inside us and it makes it bleed, it sucks the body among the maddening crowds of laughters.

Despot is much more ugly, inadaptable and hairy in the places having alleys, traditional narrow streets. It conceals its tyranny in its heavy shoes. It is the framer of play, the forger of language and the sucker of body. Executioner invites its victims for the play by knowing that every entertainment is the death of subconscious. The only requirement for the play is having no face. The bodies without faces step down the play field with a trembling excitement. Their feet touch the orb for once and the despot’s enchantment turns them all into the shape of a heavy shoe.

When the play comes to an end, the only thing having been given to all who have to buzz about in the alleys comfortably is an orb and a heavy shoe. Heavy shoe makes its hunt that has turned into a peeper rush. While the little and neat touches introduce us to the joy of dominating, domination wants to see itself everywhere. It is time to be bored, it is understood that all that happened was merely a play and it is time to apply most primitive and the most savage action which is immanent to the play. The toy that turns us into a mere heavy shoe has to be annihilated, in order to have an other toy…

Erkan Özgen 2007--------------------------------------------------------------Lost BodyIt is a time when power has crossed the borderlines of playing fields to play its ball game in narrow streets and when the spectators’ stands are abandoned for the living rooms of the houses invaded by power. A lost and naked body has put on military boots on and it is traveling across the country on a long and winding road, whilst kicking the ball. It is trying to establish peace and happiness, caught up in a hysteric state of soul. The body, moves quite in concert with the ball and tries to keep it in control. The tempo is slow in the beginning, but the tension rises from time to time. It is a four and a half minute long struggle to “control the ball” that the viewer watches tensely, waiting to see when the struggle would turn violent. In the end, the ball, pressed in between the wall and the boot, explodes and the game is over. For a moment, what comes before my eyes is the cat who, having caught a mouse, thinks that it is already in its stomach and plays with it, just to prove his agility and acumen to itself and to the mouse. The naked body prevents the ball from rolling loose by a series of inward kicks; a sign of its determination to not lose control of the ball. The nervousness that this effort creates in the body soon spreads to the viewers as well.

Power tries to use every game it can use to keep the masses in control. By making game subjects out of the society itself and of each individual, it tries to guaranteee the continuation of its power and to establish the strength of its “intelligence.” In the name of someone’s peace and despite others’ unpeacefulness. The norcosed society is oblivious of the game and that it is destined to lose. For that reason, it plays a game that it presumes as its own according to rules that it presumes as its own, and imagines a victory whilst living in a defeat.

Football, is one mean, one game of power that manipulates, trains and keeps the society in control. The true actors of this game are not the eleven players who merely make up a team. The true goal is the massive crowd of fans who identify with the teams they support. THe hooligans are the most “lost” section of this mass. Besides the national leagues, the world cups organised in every four years since the 1930s has become ever greater organizations and serve even better the above described mission, which is essentially a political strategy.

Foucault says that today’s power, which he qualifies as dispositive, negates violence. Rather than directly controling bodies, this mode of power has developed new, different means to control the society as a whole. Through these means, it manages the relations of power, enabling them to develop in its preferred ways while impeding, balancing and manipulating them in other ways. Thus the dispositives always figure within the games of power. Foucault expresses what he means by the concept dispositive and the relations of dispositives with one another as follows: “What I try to elucidate with this concept comprises discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific precepts, philosophical, moral and charitable propositions—in short, is a totally heterogenous whole, of all things unsaid as well as said. The network of relations that can possibly be established in between them is the dispositive itself.”

It is beyond dispute that modernised authority no longer seeks to control the body directly and that it is through dispositive techniques mentioned above that power is exercised. When the creative process behind the Lost Body is examined, we realize the distance that the artist’s country has yet to cover in order to modernize: the struggle of the military boot, a very potent symbol in the work, to control the ball, alludes to how the power in question is deeply engrained with militarism and if need be, controls bodies through violence.Therefore, the militarist boot controled the passive ball, the object of power on first reading, while in the second, the power, invisible and waiting behind the scenes, controls both the ball and the boot which it has made a subject of its own. From such complicated relations, we see that Foucault’s bio-power approach develops in two ways: the anatomy-politic of the body; the effort to train the body in order to make the best use of it (controling the boot) and the bio-politic; directed at ordering the population (controling the ball), work together. A subject created by power the boot uses theThus on first reading, the militarist boot directs and organizes the passive ball which is the object of power, whilst on second trading, the invisible power waiting behind the scenes turns the boot into a subject, in order to contrl both the ball and the boot. From such complicated relations we see that Foucault’s bio-power approach develops in two complementary ways: on the one hand, the anatomy-politics of the body (managing the boot) tries to train the body as best as possible in order to make the best use of it, and on the other, the bio-politics of population (managing the ball) works to administer the population. The boot is a subject created by power and hence, while controling the ball in the name of power - by violent means if necessary-, it is itself subject to the dispositive control of power.